Cassidy: Greg Bardsley's 'Cash Out' is a reminder that in Silicon Valley, fact is stranger than fiction

So, I just had coffee with author Greg Bardsley and the one thing he has me wondering, besides why didn't I write a funny novel about Silicon Valley, is why doesn't everybody write a funny novel about Silicon Valley?

I mean, can you think of a better setting for a madcap tale?

This place is kooky. So kooky that you'd think it would be the setting for more fiction than Hollywood or Washington, D.C., and that maybe it would even give New York City a run for its money. (Though, let's face it, you could tell any story you can possibly imagine through the lens of New York City.)

But I've given this a lot of thought and here's the thing: The valley is so weird that it would be tough to come up with fiction that is more outrageous than the valley's reality.

Bardsley, an executive communications director at Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), gets that and he's artfully turned the weirdness to his advantage in his debut novel, "Cash Out." What's not to like as a setting, he says.

"You have this wide variety of folks, of people coming here, at a time over the last 15 years, when people at different points felt there was a real opportunity to either change the world and/or, make a killing," Bardsley, a 45-year-old from San Carlos tells me, "and I think that is rich for satire."

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Or as Palo Alto author Keith Raffel (who's included valley scenes in his four thrillers) once said to me: "Don't we have as much ambition, money and greed as Wall Street or Hollywood?"

So true, but it's still a heavy lift, coming up with imaginative plot lines that are stranger than every day valley life.

Take John McAfee. You know, the John McAfee, who founded the antiviral software company bearing his name before selling it and exploring new beginnings. He's now been arrested in Guatemala after asking the country for asylum. (We'll take the arrest as a "no.") He'd been playing hide the eccentric with authorities in Belize who want to talk to him about the murder of his neighbor in one of the country's beach side neighborhoods.

The guy says in blog posts and interviews that he eluded police by disguising himself with hair dye and shoe polish and by stuffing a tampon up his nose to disfigure his face. And where could you cook up this bit of dialogue, which was actually uttered by Dean Barrow, the actual prime minister of Belize:

"I don't want to be unkind to the gentleman, but I believe he is paranoid, even bonkers."

Even the valley's most sacred stories stretch credibility. Two guys in a garage run a business that grows into a multibillion dollar global behemoth? (Hewlett-Packard, Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG).) A kid in a hoodie and a dorm room launches a website that draws one billion customers and makes him a multibillionaire? (Facebook.)

Which is not to say that plenty hasn't been written about the valley. Consider one of the valley's richest literary periods of late -- the dot-com era, where some very talented writers were practically obsessed with the crackle of competition, wealth, speed and innovation emanating from the valley.

A quick scan of my book case came up with: "eBoys," "The Silicon Boys," "The Perfect Store," "Perfect Enough," "Mine's Bigger," "Accidental Empires," "The Nudist on the Late Shift." All nonfiction and all packing some eye-popping tidbits. How's a novelist to compete?

In "The Silicon Boys" David A. Kaplan describes a 1998 Casablanca-themed Woodside High School charity auction where organizers sold a cruise on Oracle (ORCL) CEO Larry Ellison's yacht and raised a total of $439,000.

"Genuine Moroccan art and clothing serve as decor, courtesy of one of the parents who made a special trip to North Africa to get it," Kaplan writes. He describes a five-peaked big top pitched on the soccer field and an outdoor Moorish marketplace complete with live pythons and chickens. "If only they had replaced the 59 Mercedeses in the parking lot with camels, the 'Casablanca' atmosphere would've been complete," he concludes.

In "Perfect Enough," George Anders' 2003 look at Carly Fiorina's reign at HP, he gives us the story of Fiorina stuffing athletic socks into the front of her pants before taking the stage at a company sales meeting in her Lucent days. The idea was to defuse the male vs. female thing. As her talk wrapped up, she removed a jacket that had concealed the sock stuffing. "The bulge -- produced by those three athletic socks -- was shockingly big. As people gasped, she delivered her closing line," which let's just say was off-color.

And, of course, in "Nudist on the Late Shift," Po Bronson introduces us (thanks a lot) to, well, a nudist on the late shift -- a brilliant programmer, who after most everyone went home, liked to code in the altogether.

"In the programmer community, eccentricity is de rigueur," Bronson wrote in his 1999 book, "and when David Coons and his wife held skinny-dipping parties, he invited his friends from work. So nobody made much of it that he took his clothes off at the office after 10 p.m."

You really can't make this stuff up. Well, you could. But in Silicon Valley, it turns out, you really don't have to.

Contact Mike Cassidy at mcassidy@mercurynews.com or 408-920-5536. Follow him at Twitter.com/mikecassidy.